Health Region seeks to halt preventable patient harm

In an effort to reduce preventable harm in hospitals, the Saskatoon Health Region (SHR) has launched a 90-day initiative called Safer Every Day to target and reduce mistakes made by staff and doctors.

Morgan Modjeski, Saskatoon StarPhoenix

Updated: September 15, 2015

As part of a strategy to eliminate preventable harm in the Saskatoon Health Region by the year 2020, the region has launched its Safer Every Day initiative which will examine six departments to determine if there are any changes that can be made to improve SHR processes to help reduce—and eventually stop—preventable harm to patients.

In an effort to reduce preventable harm in hospitals, the Saskatoon Health Region (SHR) has launched a 90-day initiative called Safer Every Day to target and reduce mistakes made by staff and doctors.

Launched on Tuesday, Safer Every Day is the second 90-day initiative aimed at making improvements in the health region. A similar program to improve patient flow happened earlier this year.

“Human error is inevitable,” SHR president Dan Florizone said. “It will occur from time to time, but what’s not inevitable is our ability to actually mitigate, to manage and set up systems of control that prevent it from turning into patient harm.”

Six teams, co-led by Dr. Susan Shaw and Petrina McGrath, will examine areas like team communication, safety leadership and management and psychological safety and staff supports.

Teams will also examine how the health region can build capacity for safety and quality improvements, alongside advances to the clinical process, and the development of a new process to review all in-patient deaths.

“Patients, residents and clients that come to us are at their most vulnerable,” Florizone said. “They should have full confidence that when they arrive in our emergency department, in our in-patient centre, in our long-term care facility … that we have put their safety as a top priority each and every time.”

Dr. Shaw said she and McGrath will support and work with teams as they consult with patients, staff and families to find out about near misses and how they happened.

“We need to be able to talk about near misses and harm events openly so that we can learn from each other and we can support each other and be a safer region,” Shaw said at a launch event at St. Paul’s Hospital.

McGrath, who is the region’s VP of people, practice and quality, didn’t have hard numbers on how often patients are affected by preventable harm, but said the SHR likely sees less than 20 “critical events,” annually. She acknowledged “close calls” and “good catches” happen quite frequently, however.

Over the next 90 days, the health region will test different approaches and core foundations that make up a strong safety organization as a way to identify best practices and potential problems, she said.

“Strong communication … between patients, families and professionals, that’s a critical element to a strong safety system,” McGrath said. “What we want to test is how you actually create that in a team and then roll that out so that every team we’re working with has those critical elements.”

McGrath and Shaw said patients, staff and families are encouraged to report near misses and other concerns by dialing 306-655-1600 to report problems to the SHR directly.

This Week's Flyers

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.